Smoke and Roses
by polar-realm
Summary: A series of drabbles centered on two disparate characters with a surprising amount in common. Aeris/Jessie. Yes, really.
1. Sanctuary

Jessie finds the church by accident, looking for a place to lay low until the latest search dies down.

It's abandoned, and it looks like there's a back way out, over the rooftops, if you're prepared to climb. That, and maybe she's still operating on the old conditioning that says you don't arrest people in churches, even though she knows that's bullshit. She doesn't even know what god the place is – or was – dedicated to, but she doubts the Shinra will care. Still, she pushes through the creaky door, into another world.

The sanctuary is silent, filled with the kind of calm that settles over things, collects in corners and won't be dispelled. There are flowers, growing up through holes in the floor, and dusty light slanting down from stained-glass windows, and Jessie is suddenly very aware of the ragged fringe of her hair brushing her neck, the engine grease on her coat and beneath her nails. This isn't a human place, not really. Not someplace she belongs at all, and she's just backing out when someone steps through a door in the far wall, and she realizes that she's not alone.

It's a girl, thank the gods, and not someone Jessie's likely to have to kill. She's maybe Jessie's age and obviously civilian, in a pink dress with a threadbare ribbon pulling back her hair, and she fits this place like she was born here. Jessie feels obscurely guilty for dragging her into someone else's war.

"Don't mean to trespass," she says. "I was just – "

"It isn't _my_ church," the stranger says. "I don't think it belongs to anyone, but you can stay if you want. They won't look for you here."

_Everything belongs to someone_, Jessie thinks. That's one of the rules you learn in Midgar, the ones it's dangerous not to know, and if this innocent has lived this long without realizing it, well, it ain't Jessie's place to enlighten her. She'll figure it out eventually. Or not, as the case may be – Jessie can't guess which is kinder.

Then the rest of the words register, and she curses beneath her breath.

"That obvious, is it?"

"You're not the only one running," the girl says. "I'm Aeris, by the way. And you're Avalanche, and yes, it is that obvious. I won't ask your name, if you don't want to give it, but I guarantee I'm not your enemy." Her voice is amused, her eyes guarded enough to make Jessie wonder just how much she's misjudged. Then Aeris laughs like sunlight on water, and Jessie forgets everything she had been about to say.

_You can stay if you want_, she hears again, and maybe she'll take this stranger up on her offer. For a while, anyway. Until she's outstayed her welcome.

Then Aeris tugs her down to sit by the flowerbed, grinning impishly, and Jessie wonders if maybe she doesn't have a place here after all.


	2. Potential

Jessie's always been better with things than people. Machines have rules, algorithms – codes that always mean what they should and a set of principles that a smart mechanic can apply to any problem. People probably do too, but she hasn't been able to work them out to any satisfactory degree.

Aeris, for example. She doesn't know what to think about Aeris at all.

Jessie ran into her in the station this morning, selling flowers from a wicker basket on her arm. She had looked different, then – cheerful, yeah, smiling sweet as nobody's business, but tense. They had nodded to each other across the square, shared a look of tacit recognition, maybe something else. The loudspeaker system in the background had been crackling with news – another supply line down, casualties undetermined – and yeah, that had been them, that had been her. She could feel the flower girl's eyes on her, assessing.

Jessie had raised a hand in greeting, held her breath and crossed the station, her bootheels clicking out a rhythm to match the hammering of her heart. She usually feels at home in the slums, confident amid the dirt and noise of home, the dim neon-and-sodium glow of Midgar beneath the plate. She hadn't, then.

Jessie remembers buying a flower, only to wonder as she pressed a one gil coin into Aeris's open palm whether it had been the right impulse or a wrong one – a calculation error, maybe, some mistranslated signal. She hadn't meant to begin with a transaction, and that kind of thing always changes more than it should. But Aeris had reached up, stood on tiptoe to tuck it behind Jessie's bandana, and just for a second her smile had slipped from fixed to real.

And back at the hideout, she sits with the radio on again, holding the tenacious little blossom and remembering the way Aeris's fingers had brushed across her skin, maybe accidental, impossible to dispel. Remembering the way light had fallen in that old church, thinking about returning. It's the flowers, she tells herself, just that. She hasn't seen flowers in so long she can hardly remember, and these bright little yellow ones remind her of a time she barely has words for. She doesn't know their name, though she's too proud to admit it, or why they grow in that place at all, or why that seems to matter. Good soil, she supposes, good light, but Jessie doesn't know what's needed to make plants thrive or fail.

Machines, she knows. Machines are easy. Anything that grows, she's lucky if she doesn't accidentally kill it. And people –

People, she doesn't understand at all.

But she knows how to read a pattern, and she wouldn't be in AVALANCHE if she was scared to take a chance.

Jessie presses the flower between the pages of a tech manual, carefully, sets the book back where it should be. Tomorrow, she tells herself. She has time. Tomorrow, she'll find her way back.


	3. Untitled Drabble

When the storage tanks light up, she's already running, eyes stinging from the acrid smoke. She isn't sure what the effect of breathing in so much distilled mako might be, but side effects are contingent on getting out alive, and there's no time to speculate. Theoretically, her vest is strong enough to stop bullets. In practice, gods only know, and either way, there ain't no kind of armor that can stop a SOLDIER's sword.

She ducks down an empty corridor, hears footsteps receding outside the door. Traces the pink ribbon tied loosely around her wrist, beneath the gauntlet.

_For luck_.


	4. Untold Stories

Of all the things that Jessie knows about Aeris that maybe no one else does, the most disquieting one is this – she has a number.

It's tattooed on her left shoulder blade in flat black ink, faded with the years. The numeral **II**, just like that, cryptic and self-contained as numbers always are. Inexplicable.

"What is this?" Jessie asks once, tracing the outline half-concealed by the strap of Aeris's sundress, because she's never been good, exactly, with tact, with recognizing what not to poke at. Aeris shifts and draws away, pulls her knees up to her chest.

"That?" she says. "That's nothing much," and some laughing words about teenage rebellion, a rueful embarrassment that doesn't – _quite_ – account for the tension in her shoulders, the distance in her eyes. And Jessie's been a terrorist for a long time. She knows misdirections, alibis, she knows the rumors they've never been able to confirm, and more than anything else, she wishes she hadn't mentioned it at all.

Jessie doesn't go back to Seventh Heaven that night.

She hadn't planned to let the visit run late, because she's not used to this, because she doesn't want to impose. But she's almost out the door when Aeris catches her arm with unexpected strength, startling urgency, and asks her if she wants to stay.

She wants to. Of course she wants to.

More than that, she catches the echo of something old and barren wound through the syllables of those words, and finds herself certain that right now, Aeris doesn't want to be alone. But they don't talk about numbers again, or any kind of rebellion, or anything much except old stories, and gardens, the voice of the Planet and the mechanical engineering of Midgar. Aeris watches her from somewhere far off and holds her hand tightly, and after a while, they don't talk at all.

And later, tangled in Aeris's narrow bed, buffeted by the roar of traffic above her and the slow thunder of trains, Jessie lies awake and listens to the restless thoughts chasing themselves in circles through her head. Back before she joined AVALANCHE, she used to work at fixing things. There's nothing that gets to her more than seeing something that needs fixing, and knowing that she can't.

"Hey, Aeris?" she asks.

Aeris shifts in her arms, blinking in the half-light, presses a kiss to Jessie's collarbone and murmurs something sleepy. She looks so peaceful, long hair falling loose around her shoulders, the mako glow in her eyes almost faint enough to be nothing more than light reflected. The tattoo is stark against her skin, and it's easy to forget that just because Jessie knows the outside of someone, the salt taste of skin and sweat and the shape of old ink, that doesn't mean she'll ever know the things that matter.

"Promise you one thing," she whispers. "When we finally bring those bastards down, it won't be just for the Planet."


	5. A Place Called Home

Yeah, I'm still writing these ridiculous things...

* * *

><p>There are cracks in the ceiling outside Aeris's home, where light pours down in pale beams, and cracks in the packed dirt where flowers grow up scraggly and wild, and naive as it might be, Jessie feels safe here. Like a world apart, wrapped in the muted thunder of water falling from the Plate above, clear enough to look almost pure – though that's no guarantee of anything – and deep enough to drown in. The house itself stands two stories high, red tile roof, windows looking out. Worn down, now, but still strong, and it rests on good earth.<p>

It would be dangerous to bring a wanted terrorist back here, and so, of course, Aeris doesn't. But an ordinary girl, who works days in a Sector Seven bar and brings in extra gil rewiring people's broken radios, well _that_, Aeris explains, that's another concept entirely.

Aeris, who's beside her now with a wicked gleam in her eyes, the kind of impervious enthusiasm she always slips into when she's just a little bit frightened.

"Nervous?"

"Of course not," Jessie says.

"Don't be."

It's all the warning she gets, that and a heartbeat's worth of time to think before she finds herself dragged along the path and up to the door, stumbling a little – Aeris is stronger than she looks – and knowing better than to protest. No knocking. Just _come on in_.

And the truth is, Jessie never has been comfortable in other people's houses – not since before she left her own behind, not as many years ago as it sometimes feels. She prefers her own space, or neutral ground, someplace where she holds the advantage. And even invited, she is never quite able to ignore the feeling that her presence is an intrusion.

That's what it feels like now, stepping into a small, clean, cozy room, seeing the vases of flowers on every spare surface, the faded photos lining the walls. There's a woman seated at the table, which is piled with scraps of fabric, spools of bright thread. A moment's pause, and Aeris is pulling her forward again, scared and smiling.

"This is Jessie, mom," she says. "I've told you about her."

Aeris's mother looks Jessie over with narrowed eyes, like she's peering into a microscope, putting some improbable and inexplicably popular theory to the test. _Formidable woman,_ Jessie thinks. Runs in the family, maybe, except for the part where they aren't really related at all. But that doesn't seem to matter, because Jessie knows what she reads in this stranger's face before she looks away, which is _don't you hurt her,_ and _don't you dare let her wear herself thin. _All the things that mothers want for their daughters, and it snags at something in Jessie's heart that she hadn't even realized was there until it started cracking.

"You have a beautiful home," she says, and hopes it means what she intends it to mean. Hopes it means enough.


End file.
